Seismic interpretation is about to get faster, smarter, and more connected. CMG Seismic Solutions is uniting Bluware, Sharp Reflections, and SeisWare into an open ecosystem that removes workflow bottlenecks, enables real-time collaboration, and transforms seismic insight into faster, more confident drilling and development decisions.
HERMAN NIEUWOUDT, Executive Vice President, CMG Group, and President, Seismic Solutions
The energy industry is undergoing a major shift in how it approaches subsurface challenges. With growing data volumes, more complex reservoirs, and increasing pressure to support energy transition goals, there’s a clear need for smarter, faster, and more connected interpretation tools.
One of the most persistent barriers to progress in seismic interpretation is not the complexity of the subsurface itself, but the fragmentation of workflows. In many organizations, seismic data still moves through a chain of disconnected formats, storage systems, and teams. This slows down analysis and creates bottlenecks between interpretation, modeling, and decision-making.
The combined capabilities of Bluware, Sharp Reflections, and SeisWare, via CMG’s newly established Seismic Solutions, aims to close those gaps by providing a continuous workflow, where geoscientists, engineers, and data scientists can work from the same dataset at the same time. This would be an industry first, turning seismic insight into actionable plans with record speed and cohesion.
A CALL TO EMBRACE CHANGE
The natural question to this statement is often: are you building yet another “platform?” My answer is a clear “no.” We will enable seamless workflows across our current best-in-class tools, without locking our users into a monolithic system. In our view, open integration is the future.
Think of the Apple iMessage lesson: a walled garden approach may yield short-term control, but it invites backlash. In other words, a short-term advantage in proprietary formats or limited integrations might protect market share temporarily, but it risks alienating users and slowing industry-wide adoption of new technologies. Instead, interoperability and openness breed adoption and innovation. At CMG, our guiding principle is that Seismic Solutions technologies should not only work seamlessly together but also integrate with the other tools our customers prefer—giving them the freedom to choose the combination that works best for their workflows without worrying about connectivity.
The strategic acquisitions of Bluware, Sharp Reflections, and SeisWare reflect a focused strategy for CMG Seismic Solutions. By combining their individual strengths, we have brought together physics-based modeling, advanced data science, and user-friendly software in a way that will transform how seismic data is used. The end goal is to make interpretation not just more efficient, but more powerful.
MAKING SEISMIC DATA MORE ACCESSIBLE, FASTER
Seismic interpretation today is challenged not just by complex geology, but by the way in which data moves (or rather, doesn’t move) between teams. Files are too big, transfers too slow, and the result is often long pauses in the work while people wait for data to arrive or load.
We’ve spent a lot of time listening to our customers. They keep telling us the same thing: huge seismic files are holding them back. They are duplicating data, waiting for it to load, and losing valuable time.
That feedback is exactly what drove the creation of Bluware DataHub, which aims to resolve challenges in a geoscientist’s data ecosystem by providing a unified data access layer that integrates CMG Seismic Solutions software products with external platforms, OSDU, and cloud storage solutions. DataHub addresses issues of fragmented workflows, enabling seamless access to data across platforms and applications, while also enhancing security, scalability, and enterprise-level data management.
Rather than moving giant files from place to place, Volume Data Store, or VDS, lets teams stream seismic data directly in the cloud or on-premise. It’s about making seismic datasets instantly accessible. No waiting around for things to load, no storing the same dataset five different times.
By removing that bottleneck, interpreters can get to the real work sooner: examining the subsurface, testing ideas, and making decisions. It’s a simple change with a big impact on how fast and how well teams can work together.
COLLECTIVE STRENGTHS
Bluware’s AI tools are designed to give geoscientists both speed and flexibility in their interpretation workflows. InteractivAI, a deep learning tool purpose-built for seismic interpretation, goes beyond fault picking by enabling users to label a small fraction of any feature they can see in the data—whether horizons, channels, or other geologic patterns—and receive near-instant predictions across the full volume. These predictions can be refined on the fly, as the interpreter adjusts inputs, allowing AI to adapt seamlessly to evolving objectives. By reducing cycle times, eliminating the need for constant offline retraining, and applying the same network and workflow across a wide range of interpretation tasks, InteractivAI empowers geoscientists to explore more hypotheses in less time while retaining full control over the results, Fig. 1. In fields with tight drilling windows or shifting reservoir models, this kind of interpretive agility is increasingly critical.
An oil and gas super-major spent approximately three years interpreting seismic data for a new exploration well in the Gulf of Mexico/Gulf of America basin. The reservoir posed a risk of fault compartmentalization. Just days before spudding, the geoscience team decided to validate their manual fault interpretation, using InteractivAI. While the team believed they understood the fault network, InteractivAI identified a fault hazard near the planned reservoir takepoint. This fault had gone undetected, because its dip was subparallel to the seismic reflections and intersected the acquisition direction at a highly oblique angle—conditions that made it effectively invisible in stacked seismic data and derived attributes.
InteractivAI’s consistent prediction of this fault prompted the team to re-examine the data in detail, ultimately confirming its presence. The well path was redesigned to avoid the hazard, ensuring the well’s geologic and commercial success. Without this change, the well could have failed and resulted in the loss of a $70 million drilling cost. By avoiding the faulty original path, the operator not only saved most drilling expenditures but also preserved potential production revenues. InteractivAI detected subtle, high-risk geologic features invisible to conventional interpretation methods, protecting both operational outcomes and capital investment.
But data preparation and horizon picking are only part of the picture. For operators working with pre-stack data or managing 4D time-lapse surveys, the ability to interact with seismic at scale is equally important. Sharp Reflections has long focused on exactly this. Its software enables interpreters to analyze pre-stack and 4D datasets interactively, without waiting on batch processes. In recent projects, this has proven valuable for optimizing CO2 injection programs, tracking steam fronts in SAGD reservoirs, and refining inversion strategies for complex carbonate plays. Real-time visibility into seismic amplitudes and fluid movements supports better-informed operational decisions, especially in brownfields where margins are tight.
Harbour Energy faced challenges evaluating several amplitude-supported prospects offshore Indonesia, due to inconsistencies in contractor-processed seismic data, raising concerns about its reliability for quantitative analysis. To address this, the company deployed Sharp Reflections’ software toolkit to perform comprehensive pre-stack quality control, conditioning, and AVA attribute generation. By leveraging full-volume QC and advanced reservoir modeling, Harbour Energy was able to improve amplitude fidelity, bandwidth consistency, and event alignment—ensuring that key Class IIp events were clearly preserved, Figs. 2 and 3.
This workflow provided Harbour Energy with the confidence to calibrate seismic responses against pre-drill scenarios and move forward with drilling. The result was a play-opening discovery well in 2022, which validated the effectiveness of the reservoir-focused conditioning and interpretation process.
The addition of SeisWare to the group adds another important capability: intuitive geological mapping and well planning. While Bluware and Sharp provide data science and pre-stack horsepower, SeisWare brings accessible, interpreter-friendly tools for building stratigraphic frameworks, analyzing attributes, and designing wells. These tools help bridge the gap between interpretation and reservoir modeling, ensuring that outputs from AI or pre-stack analysis can feed directly into decisions about well placement or field development planning. SeisWare’s flexible environment is particularly well-suited for smaller teams or those operating in unconventional plays where rapid iteration is required.
ARC Resources Ltd., a leading Canadian energy producer, integrated SeisWare’s Field Development Tool with its existing geophysics software to transform its approach to long-range planning, Fig. 4. Traditionally, well planning has been a manual, isolated process, but ARC needed a comprehensive, data-driven platform that could connect geoscience, engineering, and operations for more effective decision-making. SeisWare’s intuitive, 3D environment enabled ARC to visualize development scenarios, analyze potential reserves, and create integrated workflows that improve efficiency, collaboration, and resource recovery.
By adopting SeisWare’s solution, ARC streamlined scenario testing, improved team communication, and leveraged analytics for both strategic and predictive field planning. “Our goal is to leverage data to its maximum capacity to be able to look at it from a more integrated lens and to create processes and workflows that allow us to make better and more efficient decisions,” says Rick Nakamoto, chief geophysicist at ARC Resources.
The digital environment ensures that data is dynamic and transferable, allowing ARC to optimize well placement, estimate drilling costs, and enhance long-term planning.
BUILDING AN OPEN, INTEROPERABLE ECOSYSTEM
What connects these three companies is not a rigid platform, but a shared focus on openness, interoperability and performance. The best tools for each task could be used in combination, without the friction that often comes from incompatible data formats or closed architectures. This open approach allows users to start with one tool, move to another, and return as needed, bringing with them the insights and context required for effective collaboration.Imagine integrated workflows where:
Seismic data is acutely compressed and streamed via VDS into Interactive AI interpretation;
Enhanced results feed into geological mapping and risk analysis in SeisWare;
Interpreted models transition smoothly into CMG reservoir simulation;
4D insights continually update interpretations and forecasts, enabling dynamic planning.
The cloud plays a key role in making this possible. By enabling central data access and scalable computing resources, cloud infrastructure supports the shift from isolated desktops to shared workspaces, where geophysicists, geologists and engineers can work in parallel. For example, a team might conduct structural interpretation in SeisWare, then move to pre-stack conditioning and amplitude analysis in Sharp Reflections platform. Detailed interpretation would be conducted, using Bluware InteractivAI to quickly train an AI model on the regional dataset with the output, and those from Sharp Reflections, then the user would return to SeisWare again for prospect definition. Each tool plays to its strengths, and the entire workflow benefits from centralized, cloud-hosted data and AI-driven efficiency.
A FUTURE-READY FOUNDATION FOR SUBSURFACE DECISION-MAKING
This combined capability becomes especially powerful, as teams grow more multidisciplinary and as more projects require real-time collaboration across domains. In tight resource environments, whether due to personnel cuts, budget pressures, or lower oil prices, efficiency gains of even 10% to 15% in interpretation workflows can have a direct impact on project timelines and well economics. That’s why CMG Seismic Solutions places a strong emphasis on eliminating friction across tools, reducing manual handovers, and aligning software development with how teams actually work today.
By integrating the capabilities of Bluware, Sharp Reflections, and SeisWare within CMG’s broader reservoir simulation expertise, we’re helping to reshape how seismic interpretation fits into the larger subsurface decision-making process.
Whether the goal is to accelerate prospect evaluation, improve understanding of dynamic reservoir behavior, or reduce cycle times between interpretation and modeling, this ecosystem will offer a clear and adaptable path forward.
MAINTAINING FLEXIBILITY, EMBRACING INNOVATION
The acquisitions reflect not just consolidation, but deliberate engineering of complementary strengths. Bluware’s AI, Sharp’s HPC, SeisWare’s intuitive mapping: none is intended to dominate the others; instead, each will leverage the collective expertise within an open ecosystem, delivering seamless interoperability.
In our conversations with customers, we frequently discuss friction in workflows. By reducing friction, opening interfaces, and enabling smooth transfers between technologies, we enable users to focus on what matters: scientific insight and decision quality.
As the industry feels the squeeze of lower oil prices, operational efficiencies become vital. Just as enemies in wartime often drive innovation, economic and industry pressures similarly accelerate the adoption of transformative solutions.
The synergy of these companies forms CMG Seismic Solutions’ commitment to collectively deliver an ecosystem that advances the energy sector’s aspirations in a responsible and innovative manner. WO
HERMAN NIEUWOUDT serves as executive vice president of CMG Group and president of Seismic Solutions following a promotion in July 2025. In this role, he leads all seismic technologies, including Bluware, Sharp Reflections, and Seisware, and sits on CMG’s executive leadership team. Mr. Nieuwoudt brings nearly two decades of leadership experience to CMG, having held executive roles at Baker Hughes across three continents, including vice presidential positions in Saudi Arabia and sub-Saharan Africa, and was the executive technology director for Global Wireline Services. He holds a Bachelor of Science (Honours) degree in petroleum geology from Stellenbosch University and is known for driving growth, fostering high-performance cultures, and delivering customer-focused subsurface solutions.